Xiaomi Redmi 3S, Redmi 3S Prime to Go on Sale on August 17

Xiaomi has announced that 90,000 units of the Redmi 3S Prime it had made available via Mi.com and Flipkart were sold out in approximately eight minutes during the smartphone's first sale on Tuesday. The company also revealed that the cheaper variant of the smartphone, the XiaomiRedmi 3S, will become available in its first sale at 12pm on Wednesday, August 17 - once again via Mi.com and Flipkart. The Redmi 3S Prime will also be available at the same time.

Making the announcement in an emailed statement, Manu Kumar Jain, India Head - Xiaomi, said, "We listen very closely to our fans. We realise that we were consistently getting feedback to improve on two key things - flash sales and product launch timings for India. I am very happy that we have been able to make marked improvement on both these fronts. We did a launch sale without registration for the first time ever, as we were confident that we had a significant volume with more than 90,000 units."

Jain also called the Redmi 3S Prime sale on Tuesday the "most successful open sale on Flipkart." To recall, the Redmi 3S Prime is priced at Rs. 8,999, while the Redmi 3S is priced at Rs. 6,999. The differences between the two smartphones are minor. While the Redmi 3S Prime sports 3G of RAM and 32GB of inbuilt storage, the Redmi 3S sports 2GB of RAM and 16GB of inbuilt storage. The Prime variant also sports a fingerprint sensor (on the back panel) in addition.

Common specifications of the Redmi 3S and Redmi 3S Prime are dual-SIM (Micro + Nano) support, MIUI 7.5 based on Android 6.0 Marshmallow, a 5-inch HD (720x1280 pixels) IPS display, an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 SoC, an Adreno 505 GPU, storage expandability via microSD card (hybrid dual-SIM), a 13-megapixel rear camera, a 5-megapixel front camera, 4G connectivity, and a 4100mAh battery.